Every great wrestling entrance starts with the right song, and according to a new report, AEW came very close to handing Jack Perry one of the heaviest in rock history. Per Fightful Select, grunge legends Alice in Chains and their crushing 1992 anthem Them Bones were “heavily considered, and at one point planned,” as the soundtrack for Perry’s 2024 return. Then, at the last minute, the company went in a completely different direction!
The Grunge Theme That Almost Was
It is hard to imagine a better musical fit for a sneering heel. Them Bones is the opening track on Alice in Chains‘ landmark album Dirt, a thirty-second blast of detuned menace and Layne Staley‘s haunted howl that has opened the band’s live sets for decades. Pairing that Seattle dread with a returning, chip-on-his-shoulder Jack Perry would have been a statement, the kind of rock-and-wrestling marriage that defines a character before the bell even rings.
For reasons that have not been made public, AEW scrapped the plan before it ever aired.
What He Got Instead
When Perry finally made his return at Dynasty 2024, he walked out not to grunge but to Scapegoat by Japanese composer Yonosuke Kitamura, a moody, modern choice that suited his villainous “Scapegoat” persona. He kept that theme until September 2025.
From Grunge to Tarzan Boy
The whiplash does not stop there. After the Scapegoat era, Perry went back to his classic babyface anthem, Baltimora‘s Tarzan Boy. The 1985 Italo-disco oddity, with its instantly recognizable “oh-oh-oh-oh” yodel, could not be further from the doom of Them Bones if it tried. In the span of a couple of years, Perry’s entrance music swung from planned grunge, to brooding Japanese rock, to a gleefully cheesy ’80s one-hit-wonder.
It is a reminder of how much an entrance theme shapes a wrestler’s identity, and how different Perry’s recent run might have felt with Alice in Chains ringing through the arena instead.
Perry last competed on the May 27 edition of Dynamite, falling to Mark Davis in the Owen Hart Foundation Cup tournament. Whatever comes next for him, fans now know the menacing entrance that got away.
